Getting the measure of apps

Courtesy of human nature, measurement apps for iPhone can prove incredibly addictive.

I don't know what it is about humans, but we love measuring stuff.

Well, I'm human, and I do. I started biking for fitness a few years ago and I after a few months, I was starting to get sick of it. But then I got a bike computer.

Weird. Suddenly, 8kms before work wasn't enough. I had to do more. I pushed it up to 12, then realised that was all I had time for. So could I do it faster? And so on ...

Then I discovered bike computer apps. The iPhone was in my pocket anyway. The one that's lasted the distance (literally) is B.iCycle, a German app that cost me a staggering (by app standards) $13.99.

It uses GPS to trace your ride, and even estimates how many calories you burn according to your weight, type of bike, average speed and altitudes climbed over the circuit.

It didn't exactly mesh with my bike-mounted, wheel-sensing bike computer, so I fiddled around with both trying to get them perfectly calibrated.

Then I realised the app was starting me off in the neighbouring street, cutting my circuit short. There must be some kind of GPS black hole over my house or something, plus there is sometimes a dropout on one of the roads I take.

So this morning my bike computer told me 12.4kms, but my iPhone 10.8kms.

(Also, my average speed was 19km/h, I burnt 554 calories, 41.9kph was my top speed and I climbed 67 meters – from where, I'm not quite sure.)

B.iCycle emails the data back to my computer so I have a record of my trips, and the email includes a .kml file that boots into Google Earth, showing my route. It's pretty comprehensive.

iPhone sleeper

Worse (or 'better', depending on how nutty you may be) I slept with my iPhone under my pillow for the last few nights. Why? The app Sleep Cycle uses the iPhone's onboard sensors to tell how you sleep. I therefore can tell you I was in bed at 11.46, and woke at 6:45am. I hit the dream phase almost straight after lapsing into unconsciousness, hit a really deep sleep at 1am, that state fell and rose until the dream state was hit again at 4am then 5:20, woke at 5:40 (true) then went back to sleep until the alarm went off.

Crikey. I will get the thing to monitor me again tonight, while it builds a profile. Why? Apart from that being fascinating (and I really don't know why), it will then try and wake me before the time I need to get up at a point in my sleep cycle that will allow me to feel refreshed. The alarm uses schmaltzy new age tunes ... well, they can't be any worse than the pulsing shriek of my evil alarm clock.

Will it help me? I dunno, but it's worth a shot for $1.29. As I usually awaken groggy and resentful.

Endurance

New Zealander Rob Beck has an app in the App Store called Endurance Diary. It's aimed at multisport and triathlete athletes as a diary to track their performance. So it's a bit beyond my morning bike ride, but if you're (a lot) more serious than me, you might appreciate it.

It's currently selling at the reduced price of $8.29. It can be set to the different activities, like cycling, kayaking, running – and clocks your average speeds and activity durations.

http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/triathlon-multisport-endurance/id327433563?mt=8

Rob wrote this after not finding anything suitable already available, and has another app in coming out soon ... I'll keep you posted.

Flight info

Reader James Wigg told me about a cool little freebie NZ app by Less Code – and they have a few out there.

Auckland Airport Flight Information is a realtime Auckland airport flight information server for iPhone or iPod Touch.

International & Domestic Terminals flight status for international and domestic arrivals and departures with flight number, origin/destination and ETA/ETD. It's nice, simple, clean and useful.

Snapr

I have talked about Snapr before, when the Auckland inventors were about to head off to South by Southwest in Texas to demonstrate the photo-twitter app. Edward Talbot emailed me from the US, saying "SXSW has been a great experience, we have learnt so much. While we have been here working on the conference Snapr has been exploding in use worldwide ..." Indeed, less than ten days after arriving on the market, Snapr was already the most popular location-based social networking download in the UK.

Snapr was quickly in top 20s of the free social networking category – number 5 in NZ, 6 in Australia, 9 in Switzerland, 10 in Italy, Luxembourg and Denmark, 11 in Greece, Spain and Belgium and so on.

The two designers of Snapr did not expect the service to be so popular so quickly, as what was released is essentially a demo: the majority of the web service aspect is not yet released. It's free so check it out.

TomTom updated

Finally, the NZ version of TomTom has been updated with music fading so users won't miss navigation instructions while listening to music on their iPhones. It now has pinch and zoom, an automatic Day/Night Mode to automatically adjust screen brightness for the light conditions plus an 'add to TomTom' feature so you can save locations from other iPhone apps and web browsers straight to the TomTom app. Although I douldn't figure out how to make that work.

The TomTom app (Version 1.3) is available free to existing TomTom app customers (The TomTom app costs $119.99 new).

As usual, any iPhone/iPad app news relevant to New Zealanders is always interesting to me, so please do let me know.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com